I have been traveling the world as a journalist and passionate lover of all things fun for 20 years. I have had weekly columns in USA Today and Investors Business Daily, published thousands of articles in leading magazines from Playboy to Popular Science, and am the author of Getting Into Guinness. I am the Contributing Travel Editor for Cigar Aficionado Magazine, the restaurant columnist for USAToday.com, and am a co-founder of TheAPosition.com, the leading golf travel website. I love every kind of travel, active, cultural and leisurely, and my special areas of expertise are luxury hotels and resorts, golf, skiing, food, wine and spirits. I tweet @TravelFoodGuy

Food's Biggest Scam, Part 2: "Domestic" Kobe And Wagyu Beef

Yesterday in this column I started to explain the biggest fraud in the American culinary scene: that there is no authentic Japanese Kobe beef sold in this country, anyplace. Not one slice of it. What is heavily marketed as Kobe beef on menus, in stores, and by mail order is at best an imitation of Japanese beef, and at worst has no relationship whatsoever to the genuine article.

Mine is a rather straightforward proposition – U.S. law bans the import of all Japanese beef. It’s hard to argue with that. But imitation Japanese beef is a much murkier issue.

2014 UPDATE:Changes have occurred regarding the status of Kobe beef in the United States. For the most current information, please read the 2014 piece, The New Truth About Kobe Beef, which has details that supersede information contain herein.

What about “Domestic Kobe” or Wagyu? Savvy eaters may have noticed that in recent years some menus and meat packaging have switched to these terms. I’ve also seen “American-style Kobe” and “American Wagyu” (I’ve even seen Kobe pork, Kobe bacon and Kobe pigs-in-a-blanket!). I’m not sure if these are attempts to be slightly less dishonest, but if so, they fall far short, since none of these terms mean anything to the buyer.

Restaurants in Dubai are full of live Maine lobsters, flown halfway around the world on ice at great expense to offer diners one of the best expressions of the crustacean. Customers happily pay over $100 to try the famous Maine lobster. But what if those lobsters were a different species, from the Persian Gulf, labeled “domestic Maine lobsters?” Or “UAE Maine lobsters?” That would be a total rip-off. Fortunately the restaurateurs in Dubai are not nearly as unscrupulous as those here in the States, where this kind of high-priced bait and switch is pulled off thousands of times each day with domestic Kobe – excuse me – Faux-be beef.

Kobe is the capital of Hyogo prefecture, where all authentic Kobe beef comes from. Hyogo has a climate, tradition and environment suited to raising cows with really delicious beef, thanks to an extraordinary level of fat marbling. However, it is a crappy place to grow oranges. So imagine you are an orange farmer in Kobe and understandably, no one wants to pay a premium for your juice. You can try harder, do your job better, and build a positive name for your product, or you can find a place where they have already spent generations perfecting their craft and building a reputation for their brand and simply steal it. As long as your own country’s laws don’t care, this is a quick and easy path to ripping off consumers. “Domestic Kobe beef” is the U.S. equivalent of the Kobe farmer bottling and selling “domestic Florida Orange juice” to con consumers into paying a premium for a product unrelated to its namesake reputation.

Or, he can do what some U.S. ranchers have done, and take it a step further. He can import seeds from Florida oranges, discover that the fruit does not so well in his climate, and cross it with some local fruit so it survives better in an environment that was never suited for it and still position it as essentially Florida Orange juice. He can then decide that the Japanese palate really doesn’t care for Florida orange juice anyway, because it is too “orangey,” and position his experiment as some sort of improvement on the original.

“Domestic Kobe” beef means just as much as slapping the word “domestic” in front of any other product made better somewhere else: would you drink domestic Scotch whisky? I wouldn’t. Would you spend $50,000 on a domestic Swiss watch? Would you buy domestic Champagne (well, actually Americans do, and in large quantities, often unknowingly, for the very same reason – there is no law here against bogus labeling).

Several readers wrote in yesterday to compare the misuse of Kobe to that of Champagne, but in my opinion, the Kobe issue is worse. Just about every informed consumer knows that Champagne is a place in France famous for producing great sparkling wines, and much of the time when you buy champagne, you are getting something from Champagne. Kobe is exactly the same scenario, a place known for producing excellent beef, except none of the time you buy Kobe beef are you getting something from Kobe. Also, famous chefs and editors at major food magazines don’t routinely try to fleece the American public into buying bogus champagne.

How about the more innocuous term Wagyu (often domestic Wagyu or Australian Wagyu)? It is frequently bandied about as a synonym or “translation” of Kobe. See it on a menu or in a store and ask about it and you will often be told it is the breed of cattle the famous Japanese Kobe beef comes from. Many websites selling “Wagyu” say exactly this.

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Ian, as I said it is entirely possible to breed really excellent beef from historically Japanese breeds, and I am sure some vendors do. But as long as labeling remains murky and consumers can’t know what they are buying and this industry is already fraught with outright lies, how can buyers trust anyone or know what to believe? The fact that there is no real agreed definition of Wagyu to begin with makes it easy to claim any percentage. I’m not familiar with the company, but if iI were in this business, I would emphasize the breed I am using, which is a concrete thing, rather than a catchall phrase that can arguably include all the typcial domestic cattle Americans have long bought at the supermarket.

Lone Mountain Ranch and many others ARE raising 100% Fullblood Wagyu. All fullblood wagyu breeders have animals that are registered and are easily traceable back to the animals that were imported directly from Japan. Importations of 100% Japanese Wagyu were in 1976,1993,1994,1995,1997,1998, and 2001. The bull Michifuku registration number is FB 1616. His sire Monjiro produced carcasses that sold in the 2007 All JAPAN Wagyu Competition for $16,000, 18,000, and 21,000. The fact is the registered fullblood Wagyu breeders here in the USA are legitimate. Every animal is DNA parent verified and traceable straight back to Japan. They can and do produce “Kobe” style beef.

The only Scam are the breeders crossing Fullblood Wagyu bulls with Angus, Hereford etc and claiming it is 100% Fullblood Wagyu..

People do not listen to this BS. Fullblood Wagyu beef is the same identical cows that produce Kobe beef. Just because these US cows are now raised here in the States doesn’t change their genes.

Where they are raised has an impact, though, as does what you feed them. If they aren’t raised in the exact manner that “real” Kobe cattle are, then it isn’t the same. I’m not saying you don’t. Mentioning “grain fed” on your website is a caution light as usually that means “stuff them full of corn to fatten them, then slaughter them just before the corn rots out their stomachs.” Some clarification there would go a long way.

Brian. I am so glad you raised this point. The whole concept of terroir is that some things grow or thrive better in some environments, and simply transplanting them elsewhere won’t have the same result. I know Hawaiian pineapple farmers or coffee growers don’t lose much sleep at night worrying about me recreating their plants here in Vermont where I live. Nor would I have much luck with Arizona’s famed Sajuaro cactus. Closer to the Kobe example is the pricey Jamon Iberia from Spain, from pigs who forage on a diet of wild acorns. The resulting taste of the ham cannot be matched in the US, elsewhere in Spain, not even in Italy’s famous cured hams. You can take the pigs out of the forest, but you can’t take that forest out of Spain. Ditto for the renowned oysters of Duxbury Bay, MA, the choice of French Laundry and many other top restaurants. 70% of the world is covered in ocean, but the oysters in this one bay are better (there are many other great one-off oyster spots). The list of things that require certain terroir for excellence goes on and on an on. The Kobe cattle folk claim it is largely their water that makes the place unique but frankly I’m skeptical of that one.

Brian, Actually the location of the animals doesn’t matter and they will marble on grass as well as grain. Takes a bit longer if grass is suspect but definitely marble on grass. The animals are simply genetically predisposed to marble. How the breeder finishes his product is their choice.

You are right. The first American “Kobe” beef was Wagyu from the North Western United States… at least that is where RL Freeborne a cattle rancher whose family raised catle in California started to do Artificial insemination on Wagyu cows brought in from Japan in conjunction with The University of Washington Ag School on a farm in Northern Oregon and started to sell the product back to Japan. Then, when Mad cow came along, the Japanese wisely statrted to say no to our beef and he started to sell it domestically about 20 years ago. That is when we at Green Tree started to sell it in the food sevice market in the metropolitan NY area. One of the lowest Kobe grades 2-3 is the American qualitygrade USDA Prime. The real nice stuff you see in some of the high end groceries and on a lot of restaurant tables grades out around a 7 and the Japanese dont want anything under a 9 to 10 when they are importing. This is very much like the Tuna trade. So most American Restaurants dont even get the best “Kobe” beef produced here, because Japan pays a premium for it. Also the “off cuts” suitable for grinding dont get shipped with the more prized sub-primals, fillets loins and ribs so there is a ot of really fatty ground beef thats available from these beasts domestically. Thats why you see the sliders etc on these menues.

There a lot more than one breeder doing full blood, and also not mentioned there is domestic wagyu the is crossbreed with full blood wagyu. Breed once you have a 50/50 cross, then breed that cow again and you get a 75% wagyu and repeat and you get a 7/8 wagyu the 15/16 wagyu. So the crossbreed wagyu can be a very high percentage cross and if it has a high degree of marbling you will be able to tell it is a high percentage cross. Not a bad thing in my opinion at all. Your talking minuscule difference from a 3/4 or 7/8 wagyu and a full blood wagyu. Although there’s plenty of full blood wagyu as well in the USA